This installment of of Cultural Conversations will focus on Even's project, currently sponsored by HCL, entitled Natural Life:
For the last fifteen years, video artist and documentary filmmaker Tirtza Even has created a body of work that addresses an array of complex social and political issues in Palestine, Turkey, Spain, Germany, and the US. Her latest project, Natural Life, is a feature length documentary about six individuals who, as youths, received the most severe sentence given to convicted adults—“natural life” or life without parole. Pairing interviews with inmates and those involved in their cases (family members, attorneys, police officers, and victims) with documented and staged scenes, Even’s film is an elegant and unflinching challenge to the inequities of the juvenile justice system.
Natural Life was produced alongside the legal efforts of the Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle.
Tirtza Even is a video artist and documentary filmmaker currently based in Chicago. Her work has appeared widely at international festivals, galleries and museums including MoMA, New York, the Whitney Biennial, and the Johannesburg Biennial, and is in permanent collections at MoMA, New York, the Jewish Museum, New York, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others.
